Internal Chaos Imperils America’s Global Power

President Biden is evoking the essential role of the U.S. in the fight for democracy in Ukraine and Israel, but he is under pressure in his own country.

It was one of those moments to let out a sigh of relief. In the middle of his speech only a few days after the Hamas attack against Israel, Joe Biden pounded the podium with his fist. Suddenly, a clear appeal came through in the U.S. president’s speech, which is otherwise so mumbled and slurred. During an anti-Semitism event, the 80-year-old emphatically explained why he took each of his children and grandchildren to the Dachau Memorial Site, once they were 14 years old. “I wanted them to see that you could not not know what was going on walking through those gates. You could not fail to understand as a country what was going on.”

One week later, on Oct. 19, that same thread appeared in another speech with Biden’s intention to commit his countrypeople to providing ongoing support for Israel and Ukraine. One must fight, he said, for democracy, human rights and the rule of law. Looking away when one could take action would be unacceptable. However, the president, who had just returned from Israel, was not only citing moral positions in his address from the Oval Office.

Ambivalent Starting Point

Biden was trying to present the fight against Russian autocracy in Ukraine and the fight against extremist terrorism in Israel as two sides of the same coin — as attacks on U.S. security. If one does not stand up to dictators and terrorists, according to the president, they will continue doing what they are doing and pose a direct threat to the U.S. as a result.

Biden is operating from an ambivalent starting point. Immediately after the Hamas terrorist attack against Israel, the U.S. showed clear strength of leadership. Washington is showing its muscle with aircraft carriers in the region and has negotiated with Egypt over aid transports for Gaza, and Biden has demonstrated empathetic solidarity with Israel. The comparison with the sometimes seemingly confused efforts of EU representatives, who paid a courtesy call to Biden in Washington on Friday, has to sting from a European perspective.

Uncontested Aid

But his administration is under much greater pressure than is apparent from the outside and, along with the administration, the values that Biden wants to defend abroad. A small group of right-wing extremist representatives have been demonstrating for two weeks how easily one can cripple the U.S. Congress if one wants to. They voted out Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House, perhaps just to cause chaos. And because they are blocking any successor for the same ambiguous reasons, Congress has stood still for weeks — as has about $100 billion in aid requested by Biden. If there is no agreement in the next two weeks, the nation will run out of money, and the lights will go out in Washington.

There is no need to paint such a bleak picture. The arguments that Biden presented for America’s role in the world may well convince people. The aid for Israel is essentially non-controversial, and most of the U.S. population also wants to support Ukraine.

But as strongly as Biden evoked the world’s situation as being at an inflection point in which the U.S. needs to show a strong presence, his main theme, the fight of democracy against autocracy, remains overshadowed by awareness of how quickly the U.S. role in the world can change if the fight is lost at home.